Guadalcanal [ArthurK]

72 years ago this week the war got real hot in the South West Pacific.

You keep hearing about how Japan was smashed at the battle of Midway and that decided the war. Not exactly. The victory at Midway roughly equalized the balance of power between Japan and the US. You don't think so? Look at the first week of October, 1942. Japan had 8 functional Aircraft Carriers in the Pacific, the US had ... one. Japan doesn't look so smashed!

Yet, in just a few months, Japan would be set back on her heels - completely on the defensive.

What happened? Guadalcanal happened.

I want to show you how it all played out.

@RealTimeWWII is a wonderful historical twitter account. Gives you WW2 as it happened with a 72 year offset. I'm running accounts parallel with it - focusing on the Campaign for Guadalcanal.

The accounts (@GuadaLive42 and @GuadaBattle) have been active for quite a while. First to cover the Battle of the Coral Sea and kept active to show what leads up the big fight.

Here's a storifed sample of @Guadabattle from the Coral Sea coverage.

Click this for the sample until somebody can explain to me (in comments) how to embed it.

I mean to provide coverage like that for the entire Guadalcanal campaign - except there'll be land and air battles too! Sometimes all 3 going on at the same time.

Why are there 2 accounts? On busy days, @GuadaBattle may have 100s of tweets. You might not like having your timeline flooded like that. So I have @GuadaLive42 covering the big picture and @GuadaBattle with the details.

Note that there's an 18 hour time diff between Guadalcanal and the US Pacific Time zone. The Marines invade Aug 7, around 6 am. That means the tweets about that invasion will start around noon, Aug 6 (Pacific time).

If you scroll back through the accounts, you'll get the historical reasons why Japan and the USA became interested in that worthless little island.

My twitter account is @ComradeArthur.

BTW, that picture up at the top? That's not exaggerated. The little US Destroyers were really that close to the Big Battleship Hiei during that battle. They had to take evasive action to avoid being run over. (source)

posted by Open Blogger at 01:24 PM

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